Intel B250/H270 motherboards round-up: affordable basis for Kaby Lake

Seventh generation Core-boards without empty bank account

By Tomas HochstenbachThursday 3 August 2017 04:59

B250/H270: no SLI, no overclocking

All motherboards in this round-up use the lower positioned B250- and H270-chipsets. These offer less functionality than the high-end Z270-chipset. The two main differences are the inability to overclock and the fact that the lanes for the graphics cards cannot be separated. Motherboards with the B250- and H270-chipsets are therefore not suited for Nvidia SLI. AMD CrossFire is supported in some cases, but one of the two graphics cards is connected using the lanes of the chipset in that case. This is not ideal.

In order to find the differences between B250 and H270 we have to take a closer look at the technical specifcations. The B250-chipset offers 25 instead of 30 IO-lanes, slightly limiting motherboard manufacturers in terms of connectivity possibilities. With H270 the chipset allows for a maximum of 8 USB 3.0-connectors; the B250-chipset limits this to six. This means that the combination of four USB 3.0-connectors at the back and two internal headers of that type (which can control two connectors each) are only found on H270-boards.

We still find PCI-slots on this Gigabyte B250-HD3P.

Two relatively cheap boards stand out because they only have a single full-size PCI-Express-slot. The boards are often further filled with x1-slots; on two Gigabyte models we even find PCI-slots.